Zaraki
by SEG-CISR
Summary: Serving under the Emperor, there were many things to be seen... good and bad. Between wars, he found joy. Then he lost it.


**This is my first foray into Bleach writing, and damn did the prequel chapters completely **_**not agree with the plot I had in mind.**_** Well, not quite, but it was slightly different, so you can gleefully stick an AU button on this one's sweater.**

A large man leaned on a crumbling earthen wall by the roadside, his features obscured by the darkness outside and the slight fog. All that a passerby would be able to discern would be his size and his obvious musculature. However he was not proud of his muscles, not proud of his power and height and strength... at this moment he felt nothing.

His name... wasn't important. He'd lived a long life serving the Emperor, eventually setting up a family in Northern Korea after so many promotions... His rank never mattered, only that he was allowed his heart's desire for his importance. That was all after the horrible war against the Chinese, a vicious fight between the growing power of Japan and the established Chinese Empire, whose legions came from every nook of its sizeable territory.

War was expected in the army, and he did his best to serve his emperor and his nation, commandeering over a thousand men to victory time and again long after the war escalated and thousands of troops poured from the small archipelago of Japan into the Asian mainland.

In Pyongyang he had found her. After the city was won in a bloody battle, fifty of his men falling and at least a hundred being shipped home due to their wounds, he had found this woman huddled in a small hut, hands over her head to protect herself from any debris that were to come down on her.

As he had approached her, that tiny woman only made smaller by his comparative size, she looked up with wide eyes, bringing her hands up from her head, to her back... and then pulling an old musket on him.

It was love at first sight for the soldier.

It was awkward talking to the woman at first; Fu Ling- that was her name- was a curious person with even more curious traits. Her way of speaking was peculiar and she was hard to read, but of one thing he was sure- she was thankful for him. Any other soldier would have shot at her and killed her, given that the musket she wielded was rusted beyond use inside and wouldn't have done anything to deter an attacker. They would have panicked, shot at her, who just wanted these people- be they Chinese or Japanese, given that she couldn't have cared less about her ancestry- out of her home, out of Pyongyang so she could live on normally. They would have shot before asking questions, maybe not to kill but certainly to incapacitate.

But he was not skittish like so. He felt home in the battlefield, and was no less relaxed than when practicing with his swords when he saw the barrel pointed at his face. He extended an arm as long as her leg to the crouched woman, pulling Fu Ling from her shelter and shaking his head as she attempted some half-hearted Chinese. Tentative attempts at Japanese were met with a smile and she smiled back.

The war ended soon after their first meeting. He had advanced on to the Yalu River, moving into the tiny village of Wiju, building a small house for himself near the coastline when the hostilities ended.

A few years later he was disturbed from his quiet life by a knocking on his front door. At the time he was in the yard of his house, keeping in shape despite his relaxed lifestyle- after all, he was still in the Imperial Army- and basking in the afterglow of another milestone in physical strength reached. He stood from beside the smashed piece of bark, crushed by his bare hands and eliciting a chuckle from him as he imagined what he could do to a man at that point. As he pushed off these thoughts, he peeked from the back of his house, looking from the Eastern wall at the visit.

Fu Ling stood at his door, and with a great grin he made himself known. The broad man had walked happily from the back of his house, footsteps echoing and garnering the woman's attention. Looking up at him with great bright eyes, Fu Ling flung herself at him without a word, failing to get her arms around him but crying all over his chest regardless.

"I've been looking for you. For years." She had told him that night, lying on the spare futon he kept.

"Why?" He was truly puzzled. She had been on his mind since they had parted, but he never expected that she would come to him as he dreamed every night. She didn't answer. It was fine, he didn't need a response.

In 1900, in the onset of spring, they married. The huge, talented commander and the tiny, bouncy girl from Pyongyang lit up the town for nights afterwards, although that may have been due to the loud noises from their house awakening the inhabitants of Wiju.

When the war with the Russians came, he was surprised, but he promised his wife and young daughter- Yachiru, a four-year old as bouncy as he mother had ever been- that he'd come back after everything was done. Both waved and shouted goodbyes at him as he walked away with an old subordinate of his, now commander of a cavalry regiment.

He was sent back to Pyongyang to train new troops- most of them drafted Koreans who barely knew how to fight in a street, much less in a war. It was a learning experience for both himself and them; he'd lost a lot of his edge in the years living peacefully, but now he was back and he was ready to fight.

He had not heard from his wife and child for a few months when he led an attack on Port Arthur. Amongst the dead bodies of his men after a failed offensive he had received the news from a short, skinny messenger. They were dead, casualties from the vicious fighting near Wiju.

He had never felt such rage, before that moment. The world was tinted red for a second, and his mind shut down. Next thing he knew he was holding the man by his shoulders, the terrified messenger's feet dangling over a meter from the ground as he screamed and shouted and pleaded at the man to admit he was lying.

Little Yachiru and Fu Ling, they were fine, right?

... They weren't. After so many failed attacks on Port Arthur, the Imperial Army was building up forces for another offensive, and within that time he was allowed to see his home. It was demolished, one of the walls having been blown apart and bringing down the roof. He pushed into the house and looked for them. They were just hiding there, of course. They were not dead, Yachiru and Fu Ling were just too playful.

His calls for his daughter and wife soon became panicked, before he caught sight of a pretty pink kimono he had gotten Yachiru for her birthday; she loved to go to town in it, and always did her best to keep from getting dirty. At that point it all hit him.

They were dead. His life and joy, gone... For months now, they were gone.

Hours later he stumbled out of the gutted, collapsed structure and looked around with eyes still bright from tears. He spotted two bumps in the ground, one noticeably smaller than the other. Above them were two stones, marked with names. Yachiru, Fu Ling. He had no last name, nor did they. Fu Ling had given up her ancestry, and he was simply an orphan who had become a soldier.

A larger rock lay behind these two tombstones, a message engraved by the men who had buried them. "Our great commander's wife and child lie here, the 18th Cavalry Division letting them rest in peace under the ground for their husband and father could not. Our condolences, commander."

He pushed himself harder every day, learning to work every weapon available to his men and more. He looted fallen Russians' weapons and practiced, worked to become the perfect soldier to kill every one of these accursed men who had taken them...

His death had come sooner than expected. Too soon, he had killed only fifteen men before he fell. The men he commanded were left without a leader for a week before a new one was dredged up by the army, during which they barely held their ground whilst giving their prayers to him, who had died in grief, charging into a trench and setting it ablaze with gunfire, killing men left and right with blades before he was mobbed.

And now he leaned in this strange place, a sprawling city that seemed so much like Wiju... yet it was enormous, so much bigger than Kyoto or even the Edo of his youth, renamed Tokyo before he visited it again. The houses, the buildings were all short, and many were even akin to huts in their structural integrity.

"So this is what the dead enjoy..." He pulled his long hair to his back, staring emotionlessly at the passersby. They were all scared, not by him but by the place... Zaraki was the name of the district, he had heard from a conversation nearby. He wondered why they were allowed to live in such poverty, where there was obviously crime... so much for heaven.

Heaven... perhaps that existed too. He was a soldier; he'd killed so many and had flown into a fit of rage before his death. But there were so many children here... what if Yachiru and Fu Ling had been thrown into this hellhole? What if his daughter had been separated...?

He crumpled like wet paper, sliding down the worn wall and pulling at his hair in despair. His white garments were dirtied by the ground but he could care less as he looked up at the blank gray sky.

"Hiya mister!" A cheerful voice interrupted his brooding; much too cheerful, he felt, for the place and situation. He was dead, dead!

... why was he dead, anyway? How did he... die?

He'd been... a soldier. In a war... against the Chinese. Then the Russians... right? He'd fought for...

Poke.

He looked up at the round-face of a young girl. His eyes widened. She was so young... he had a daughter, she was young. She had... pink kimono? No, there was pink... the little girl had pink hair!

"Yachiru?" His voice was barely above a whisper, and the girl blinked curiously.

"I don't have a name. But... I like that one! I'll take it!" She grinned. "Do you have a name?"

"I... I don't remember. I don't remember much." The girl's wide brown eyes opened even wider as her mouth opened and closed time and again.

"That happens a lot with people who just get here. I don't know why... but a lot of them just get a new name! I didn't have anyone with me when I got here, and no one tried to give me one, so I went without one... till now!" She hopped in glee. Was this how much it took to cheer up a child here? But going without a name and then getting one... he empathized with the girl. Why, though? Did he have no name as a child?

"Do you have an idea... Yachiru?"

"Hm... Zaraki!" Her voice was high and slightly shrill, but it was pleasant to his ears. It just seemed right that Yachiru's voice was like that. "Like the district, it's really big, and you're big too, so you're alike!"

"Zaraki... I like that. But, I think I'll need another name." He stood up slowly, smiling softly as Yachiru boggled at his height now that he stood up. "Come on." He reached down and pulled the girl to her feet from her crouch, then kept pulling. She squealed in joy as she was pulled from the ground, then giggled as he put her on his shoulder.

**I was planning to leave Kenpachi nameless through the whole story- until the end, and then you'd find out who it was. Or maybe before, with "huge dood" and all that jazz. But that didn't work out so well, what with the fact that I needed a title and Zaraki was nice enough in my head. Tho it all works out in the end; to call him Zaraki from the get-go would've been silly; he's just a soldier dude and is turned into something recognizable and given **_**that**_** name afterwards.**


End file.
